Fringe Fact v. Fiction: Could Your Brain Actually Turn to Goo?

In its 12th episode, Fringe brought back one of the all-time greatest, grossest sci-fi horrors: Liquefied brains.

While investigating a string of murders, the agents find viscous liquid oozing from victims' orifices-something has turned their brains into nothing but goo. Sure enough, drilling a hole into a victim sends brown goo, all that's remaining of his brain, dripping out of his skull. "The brain goo that they made is maybe the most disgusting thing I've ever seen," Fringe
star Joshua Jackson said in a promo for last night's episode, "The No-Brainer." But is the brain science as far off the mark as it has been in past episodes?

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First, the facts: A human brain floats in a kind of clear liquid called CSF, or cerebral spinal fluid, says Brown University neuroscientist John Stein. CSF comes from the meninges (which get infected when you have meningitis), and it's what doctors extract and test during a spinal tap. And, Stein says, there are clinical examples of people losing the fluid in their brain when a spinal tap resulted in a tear. When they stood up, gravity pulled the CSF out and gave them headaches; when they laid back down, it rushed back in.

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"The brain is very fragile," Stein says, "it's like pudding." However it's not going to come oozing right out your nose-the Fringe scenario, Stein says, is totally implausible. Radiation therapies such as Gamma Knife surgery target gamma rays on a single point to destroy tumor cells, but Stein says that's not like liquefying your brain. Theoretically, an extremely intense microwave could boil the water in your brain, he says, but the grey matter is made of fatty tissue. To melt the entire brain, as the Fringe killer does, you'd have to find a method of melting fatty tissue. But even if you could do that, he said, it would melt all the fatty tissue in the rest of your body, not just your brain and leave the rest of you untouched like the victims on the show.

Overloading the Brain: Seizures vs. Meltdown

The brain liquefaction in "The No-Brainer" starts when victims open a pop-up ad on their computer screen that unleashes a wave of flashing violent, quickly-cut images. The victim sees a hallucination of a glowing hand reaching out to them from their computer screen; meanwhile, the pictures and sounds cause a reaction that destroys--and then liquefies--the brain. Walter Bishop, the mad scientist from Harvard, explains to Agent Olivia Dunham that the brain attack works using "a complex combination of visual and subsonic aural stimuli, ingeniously designed to amplify the electrical impulses of the brain, trapping it in an endless loop."

The brain attack is supposedly like a computer virus, and they share at least one thing in common--the sneak attack. Victims on Fringe unleash the brain-melting attack by opening an innocuous-looking pop-up ad, much the way a virus can be piggybacked on a legitimate file, or the way a Trojan horse disguises itself as a legitimate-looking program. But Stein says that amplifying someone's brain impulses to kill them is where the reality stops.

The electrical impulses in our brains are tiny, and vary by the microvolt--they're hardly even detectable by an electroencephalogram (those electronic sensors they stick on your forehead). "It's orders of magnitude weaker than a 9-volt battery," he says. The biggest spikes occur when different areas activate synchronously, he says, and that only happens during deep sleep-wakened brain activity is asynchronous. Compared to the brain's puny electrical output, the heart's electrical impulses are huge.

There is a real-life analogue to Walter's idea of visual stimuli damaging your brain: seizures. Some seizures can be caused by visual stimuli, he says, such as flashing lights. And while one seizure doesn't destroy your brain, Stein says, repeated ones over years can have cumulative effects.

But even if you could amplify someone's brain electrical impulses, could that melt his brain? No, Stein says. In reality, the damage caused by chronic seizures tends to result from neuron death. High levels of calcium can sneak in and kill the cell, he says, it's the same thing that happens when blood flow to the brain is cut off, and the reason that brain cells are among the first to die after blood loss. But don't expect a seizure, a microwave or anything else to turn your brain into runny brown goo.